The Effect of Taxes and Bans on Passive Smoking

Jerome Adda and Francesca Cornaglia

No 2191, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers. We use a novel way of quantifying passive smoking: we use data on cotinine concentration – a metabolite of nicotine – measured in a large population of non-smokers over time. Exploiting state and time variation across US states, we show that excise taxes have a significant effect on passive smoking but smoking bans have contrasting effects on non-smokers. While bans in public transportation or in schools decrease the exposure of non smokers, bans in recreational public places perversely increase their exposure by displacing smokers to private places where they contaminate non smokers, and in particular young children. Bans affect socio-economic groups differently: we find that smoking bans increase the exposure of poorer individuals, while it decreases the exposure of richer individuals.

Keywords: passive smoking; taxes; bans (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2006-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published - published in: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2010, 2 (1), 1-32

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2191.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effect of Taxes and Bans on Passive Smoking (2006)
Working Paper: The effects of taxes and bans on passive smoking (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2191

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().